You must also think about the fact that many people may not know enough about computers in general to ask an understandable question. When I first started Linux, I was totally lost as I had been trained in Win. and nothing else. I had a windows-computer oriented look at computers, and as a result, was totally lost as how to ask a question. What it finally took me doing was asking HOW to look for information, and that got me on the right track on figuring stuff out on my own, as well as asking legible questions. So when people ask seeminly idiotic questions, we should keep this in mind and tell them how and where to look, and keep helping them(keep up with the thread and don't ignore their further questions), until the problem is solved. Take it from a noob-this really works, I learned alot about how linux works, and where I can go to look for stuff from people doing this to me.

Well, I actually feel that the same question appearing over and over and over again ad-nauseam is a bad trend. But you bring up a very good point.

On even a good query, tightly focused, you'll often get dozens of pages of hits. Many will be RTFM responses, as you described.

Since I would prefer to see all questions and answers on a related topic in a single thread, wouldn't it be nice if you could to a search that is performed only within that thread? For instance, the ubuntu forums contain some very good "How-Tos" that are now, unfortunately, over 200 pages long. It would be great to be able to drill down within that thread to find what you're looking for.

I hope you at least plan to anesthetize the newbie first?

some of us newbies like pain ty :-)

I completely agree. That's exactly how I was/still am with most things.

It's not about what kind of questions people ask, it's about their attitude (hostile, friendly etc.)

Most people here are helpful to newbies if their attitude is correct even if they may not know how to ask questions properly.

Ultimately the whole issue is not Linux but about proper communication. Nobody can claim to be a newbie at communication...

Yet another "I eat n00bs" thread.

What's funny is that everyone, no matter how much they know will always be a newbie in something.

What about non-English speakers?

In your profile, one of the pieces of information you can include is "Location". Since we can ignore entries like "Cylon Occupied Caprica", putting at least your country can buy one a great deal of sympathy and leeway on one's use of English. It's the one's that are obviously from an English speaking country that refuse to assemble anything even remotely resembling a coherent thought that cannot - and should not - be excused.

Communication is something much more than being able to write and speak proper English with grammar. It has a lot to do with attitude also.

We always excuse poor grammar and spelling. But poor attitudes are very difficult to excuse.

Okay, I may be a newbie here, but I frenquent a good many other forums for games, and a few windows tech support forums to help out now and then. And I have noticed that the newbies tend to come in a few different flavors. Please, keep a hold of your sense of sarcasm for this, because it is not to be taken scientifically:

Species "postn'run absentsapien"
--Posts one undecipherable post in bent english, never elaborates, and disappears. I often wonder what kind of lives these people live...

Species "1337 1337i4n"
--Just comes to show that they are 1337. Once people belive them, they are gone. Some of them might actually be 1337, but no one cares...

Species "Quiet Shynese"
--Lurks for 6 months. Posts once every week on a random topic. Never posts twice on the same thread. i guess some people like to listen more than they talk.

Species "Pomp4ssian Flamus"
--Goes from forum to forum flaming people. never provides rebuttals. Sometimes they stick around until they're banned. There must be a lot of forums on the internet, because the same ones never come around twice...

Species "Physicalis threatian"
--Makes nothing but physical threats. They all are apparently 6 foot 5 inch tall, have a tool the size of a baseball bat, and spend most of their days walking around kicking people butts. You know, except the 6 or 7 hours a day they spend telling people about it on the internet...

Species "suckabus suckian"
--Just joins a forum to say that the topic of said forum sucks. if it's a Linux forum, they drop in to say linux sucks. if it's the Ghost Recon forums, they come in to say Ghost Recon sucks. if its a windows forum, it's someone coming in to share how much Windows sucks. Ad nauseum...

As far as I'm concerned YOU are hostile; the one who seeks
advice from volunteers shouldn't be referring to them as "working
for him", that's a very foul attitude; biting the hand that feeds him.


Cheers,
Tink

You had a similar reaction when efi first posted to this thread. Out of curiousity, why are you re-opening?

BTW, the original silly idea of numbering DIED---Down in flames...

The overall worth of any human being can not be based on either computer or on Linux knowledge.
There are humans capable of building their own computers and what have you, but you would not want to live with them or work for them because of other facets that they possess.

As someone who has asked many a stupid question about Linux and computers on this and other forums I can say that Most of the time I have been treated respectfully and helpfully.

Newbies can expect to be made fun of; such is the state of human nature. Only once has a young member went into a ranting rage at me for being less aware of Linux than he expected me to be.

Nobody lives forever and Nobody knows everything there is to know about everything!!!

Stupid questions: questions which are written as rants such as "linux sucks because it's hard" (read: I'm too lazy to RTFM and/or use google), questions which are answered by stickies, or asking "which distro" when you want to do all the typical stuff (use office suites, play games, surf the web, etc.), because it's asked several times a day. We really need an "Ultrap-Super-Xtreme Which Distro Ultra-Megathread Extravaganza" for the "which distro" question. The daily Windows vs. Linux thread problem has been largely solved by the "megathread"

Now, while I made a sweeping generalization above, there can be exceptions. e.g.,

"Hi, I'm running SuSE 10.1 and I've searched and followed the instructions but I still cannot play DVDs. I get error message (foo bar zag nut) when I try playing DVDs, then xine crashes. Has anyone run into this? Where do I start?" --- not a stupid question by a long shot.

Or the smart way to ask about a distribution: "Which distro is the best choice for bleeding-edge fooVidia barForce675462 chipset? I've tried several like Debian, Slackware, and Fedora but the install CD won't even boot for any of those." or "Hi, I'm developing an entertainment appliance where our development environment will be a PC. We'd like to use embedded Linux, but need the environments (software selections, etc.) to be similar for easy support and debugging. Which distribution would be a good starting point? Requirement/caveat: the distribution will need to be able to be very granularly tailorable so we can easily remove all unnecessary packages." -- one might suggest slackware or LFS, however, it's a lot of work to get those to the point where you'd want to do development on them compared to some other options. Again, not a stupid question because it's not the typical "which distro" question.